Because I suck at pronouncing stuff I’ve never read before. Silly me! Horse & Hound knows about this phenomena – let’s call it a ’syndrome’. When you are concentrating on reading something without making a mistake, sometimes you read it phoenetically like it’s written. Hence, Witchita (Witch-it-ahh) became “Witcheetuh” one fateful night at my quiz in Hood River. I got an earful for that, lemme tell ya!

It even spread like some disease to other quizmasters. Polly guffawed long and hard about it, because I used to call her on her mistakes when she was my quizmaster, back in Hillsboro like 2 years ago (When she said Greenwich phoenetically, we heckled her for about a month.) I forget her exact comment on the blog post where I admitted to doing the same thing, but it was something like, “HAHA HOW’S IT FEEL JACKASS!” She may have used different words, not sure.

ANYWAY, the point is that I said “Battle of Gloucester” completely wrong. Gloucester is pronounced really, really different from the way it’s spelled. Gallagher had it right man, the English language is so dumb sometimes. It turned into a great discussion though. The important part, I’m sure you know, is that she totally schooled me.

Tonight the crowd braved the crazy hot temperatures to do some trivia, and I’m quite happy they did! First place with a commanding lead all night were The Fightin Menonites. In second place came The Army of Skanks. We laughed, we cried, we went to the schoolhouse. Overall, I’d do it again. Say, next Thursday?